Oracle Database Performance Management White Paper

"Oracle Database Performance Management", Gaja Krishna Vaidyanatha : "Oracle Performance management can be classified into 2 types - proactive and reactive. Proactive performance management involves designing and developing the performance architecture for a system, during the early stages of an implementation. This involves hardware selection, performance & capacity planning, mass storage system selection, I-O sub-system configuration & tuning (i.e. RAID), and tailoring the various components to suite the complex needs of the application and the Oracle database. The reactive component involves performance evaluation, troubleshooting, tuning and fine-tuning an Oracle environment, within the boundaries of the existing hardware and performance architecture. This paper is intended to provide a solid knowledge base for any “reactive” effort."

An interesting paper actually, as it covers the performance tuning methodology from an instance tuning perspective.